This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I would not be captain save a ho in that situation, but yeah the whole invisible parallel dating structure where somebody can have 10 dates a week without any of it really getting back to their own social circle sets up a ton of weird incentives. A lot of behavior from both men and women only really makes sense if you assume there's no particularly effective way of developing a reputation and that there's an infinite flow of future prospects.
The lack of ANY kind of reputation system built into the apps... and the ad hoc attempts to create one anyway (remember the Tea app?) gives away problem, yeah.
The app companies don't want to spend money to build up the whole system that would be required to litigate whether someone who didn't show up for a date had a valid excuse or whether this guy was stringing multiple women along with no intent to commit.
And they probably correctly presume that such a system would, itself, get gamed by certain parties to gain advantages in the app. But they do not admit that people are already gaming the hell out of the existing structure of the apps to everyone's detriment.
Also both can be true in a given interaction/I've been third-person spectator to enough cases of 'person behaves outlandishly but thinks they're the aggrieved party' from both genders that I can see how it's an absolutely untenable thing to police at scale.
And therein lies the rub.
We used to have semi-distributed reputation/surveillance networks that could monitor behavior and punish egregious instances of it. It was clearly less than perfect, yet whisper networks and informal ostracizing miscreants was able to police both genders' behavior without needing a central arbiter to make these determinations.
Phones took a lot of these things out of the public eye and then dating apps made it much simpler to pick up people outside your social network thus not subject to the reprisals for bad behavior.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link